Schneider: Time to rein in civil asset forfeiture

Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced plans to expand the use of civil asset forfeiture, something that columnist Christian Schneider says is a very bad idea.(Photo: Susan Walsh, Associated Press)

As a police officer in the dangerous 75th Precinct of New York City in the 1980s, Mike Dowd found public safety to be a pretty lucrative business. As detailed in the excellent Netflix documentary "The Seven Five," Dowd would often happen across crime scenes where drug dealers had stashed garbage bags full of cash; feeling underappreciated for all the dangerous work he did, he saw no problem with lifting cash from a scene before it could be processed as evidence.

Of course, the temptation of so much money sitting under their noses is what drives some cops to turn to the dark side. But while society considers those vigilante cops to be corrupt, the practice of departments seizing money and assets based merely on suspicion of a crime having been committed has become commonplace.

Last week, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced plans to expand the use of civil asset forfeiture, a practice that allows law enforcement agencies to seize cash and property from individuals whether or not they have been charged with a crime.

Under Sessions' directive, the federal government would have greater latitude to "adopt" local cases, thus allowing law enforcement to circumvent many of the hurdles put in place by state and local governments. The federal government then keeps a portion of the proceeds from such investigations and spreads those funds out to departments across the country. (According to one study, Wisconsin received around $51 million in these funds between 2000 and 2013.)

Sessions argued that the practice is necessary to combat drug trafficking and other crime syndicates. "We will continue to encourage civil asset forfeiture whenever appropriate in order to hit organized crime in the wallet," he said.

But this practice of, as some groups have put it, "policing for profit," is almost certainly a violation of the protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution. Seizing an individual's property without a conviction — or even an arrest — makes a shambles of due process and invites abuse by police departments.

And the practice has become far more widespread. Over the past decade, police have seized $3 billion from individuals suspected of drug activities but who have never been charged with any crime. Much of that money has been taken from simple traffic stops, where cash can be seized simply if a vehicle is suspected of having been involved in a drug transaction. Thousands of those individuals were then forced into court to try to get back their money and property.

It's a system that once allowed District of Columbia police to seize a grandmother's home after her grandson came home and made a phone call to consummate a drug deal. Last year, Oklahoma sheriffs pulled over a Christian rock band from Burma and seized $53,000 on suspicion of connection to drugs. (The charges were quickly dropped and the money returned.)

Efforts are being made legislatively both at the state and federal levels to rein in this abusive practice. In Wisconsin, Rep. Dave Craig (R-Town of Vernon) has introduced a bill that would require a civil forfeiture to follow a criminal conviction, and even then, the forfeiture would have to be proportional to the crime committed. For instance, an entire house couldn't be seized if a college student sold a small amount of marijuana to his roommate.

At the federal level, U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner has introduced what he calls the "Deterring Undue Enforcement by Protecting Rights of Citizens from Excessive Searches and Seizure (or, DUE PROCESS for acronym enthusiasts) Act," which would allow property owners an expedited process to challenge their seizures.

Yet even with support for reining in the practice, Sessions has pressed on with expanding it. The federal program amounts to little more than a blackmail scheme to ignore state laws. Perhaps under the Justice Department's own standard, taxpayers should get to seize Sessions' car.